Web resources

.Astronomy (pronounced dot-astronomy) aims to bring together an international community of astronomy researchers, developers, educators and communicators to showcase and build upon these many web-based projects, from outreach and education to research tools and data analysis. .Astronomy runs an annual conference, posts news, hacks, talks, tools and unconference material.

This page is intended as a forum for discussion and information sharing in the general arena of astroinformatics. Post your thoughts, questions, links to articles or resources of interest to this group, etc.

The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) is a free, on-line registry for source codes of interest to astronomers and astrophysicists, and lists codes which have been used in research that has appeared in, or been submitted to, peer-reviewed publications. ASCL currently houses >750 codes which are indexed in the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS).

A community knowledge base for performing astronomy research with Python with lists of useful resources, a forum for general discussion, advice, or relevant news items, users' code snippets or scripts, and longer tutorials on specific topics. AstroPython is organized by a team with Thomas Robitaille, Gus Muench, Eli Bressert, Tom Aldcroft, and Prasanth Nair.

This website is primarily aimed at hobbyists and amateurs interested in astrostatistics. Astrostatistics is an area in the broad field of astronomy particularly suited to hobbyists, since many data sets collected by professional instruments are available for public use.
Astrostatistics.org covers the application of statistical, analytical and computational methods to astronomical data.

Hyperspectral imaging is popular in many science areas such as remote sensing or laboratory experiments. In astronomy its spectacular development will provide soon to the community hyperspectral data with unprecedented level of complexity. With its 90,000 spatial elements and 4,000 spectral channels, the 2nd generation AO* assisted integral field spectrograph MUSE for the VLT is representative of these new instruments which will provide massive hyperspectral data. The aim of the DAHLIA project is to develop innovative signal processing methods in various areas relevant to the field.

Eureqa is a software tool for detecting equations and hidden mathematical relationships in your data. Its goal is to identify the simplest mathematical formulas which could describe the underlying mechanisms that produced the data. Based on genetic programming and symbolic regression. Eureqa is free to download and use.

Glue is a Python library to explore relationships within and among related datasets. Its main features include: Linked Statistical Graphics (scatter plots, histograms and 2D/3D images with brushing and linking); flexible linking across data (logical links overlay visualizations of different data and propagate selections across data sets); and full scripting capability (Python with Numpy, Matplotlib, Scipy, etc. libraries and user-supplied code).

The International Virtual Observatory Alliance has an IG on astroinformatics. The group develops scalable data mining algorithms and the accompanying new standards for VO interfaces and protocols, so that these algorithms can be discovered and used transparently within VO science workflows or in standalone data exploration applications. The IG is also an arena where different groups can share experiences and plan future developments.

The purpose of this guide is to show how the techniques of data mining can be used in astronomy to improve the science. It is written with the typical astronomer in mind. Sections give an overview of the data mining process and algorithms, advice on choosing algorithms, several dozen published examples of data mining in action, and links to books and on-line resources. Authors are Nick Ball (Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics, Canada) and Sabine McConnell (Dept. of Computing and Information Systems, Trent University, Canada)

A series of hands-on workshops to explore the Python language and analysis tools to solve real-world problems that astronomers are likely to encounter in research. The interactive workshops use a full suite of plotting, analysis, and file reading tools. It includes AstroPy, a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster interoperability between Python astronomy packages such as PyFITS, PyWCS, vo, and asciitable.

SciCoder is a site that aims to bridge the gap between research scientists and modern programming practices. Its mission is to provide detailed tutorials, snippets of useful code, and place for scientists to come for help on programming topics. Operated by Demitri Muna of Ohio State University.

Skysoft is a community-supported astronomical software database. Our goal is to be useful to both end-users and developers. We host all software kinds, from general data reduction packages, to specialized libraries, to small specific tools. Users and developers are invited to contribute with software news, user's views, comments and bugs notifications, and general astronomical news.

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the world’s best ground- and space-based telescopes for the exploration of the universe. WWT blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience delivered over the Internet. Students of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the cosmos using WWT’s simple and powerful user interface. Utilizing the Microsoft® high performance Visual Experience Engine™, WorldWide Telescope allows you explore the universe as never before.

This is a Web site and organization operated by Jacek Becla (Stanford Linear Accelerator) that attempts to tackle challenges related to extreme scale data sets. Main activities include identifying trends, commonalities and roadblocks related to managing and analyzing extreme scale data sets, and facilitating development and growth of appropriate technologies including (but not limited to) databases. XLDB organizes annual conferences, runs a blog, provides use cases and science benchmarks for petabyte data management, and develops new database algebra and syntaxes.